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Sun, Verari Expand Blade Portfolios

While Sun is offering a new system based on Intel's quad-core chips, Verari is adding to its line of dense blade-based platforms.

Sun Microsystems and Verari Systems are each preparing to expand their blade portfolios as the market for these high-density systems continues to build.

On Feb. 20, Sun announced its latest blade to use Intel's quad-core Xeon processor-the Sun Blade X8450. The four-socket system is the most recent offering that uses Intel processors after both companies announced a new joint agreement in 2007.

In addition to Sun's new blade server, Verari-a company best known for its line of high-density servers and storage products-announced Feb. 19 its new blade platform dubbed BladeRack 2 XL, which can pack up to 72 blades and 576 processor cores into a 87.5-inch enclosure.

Further reading

The new Sun blade will fall under the company's 8000 Modular System line, which includes both Intel-based systems as well as blades that use Advanced Micro Devices processors. The new X8450, which supports four quad-core Intel processors from the chip maker's 5400 series, offers up to 32 DIMM (dual in-line memory module) slots that each support 4GB of RAM each.

The new Sun blade also offers 160G bits per second of I/O throughput, which Mike McNerney, director of Sun's blade server product line, said makes the system suitable for high-performance computing, virtualization and other mission critical applications, such as data base software.

With these types of applications, McNerney said Sun wanted to roll out a four-socket blade that could offer the same type of computing power as a standard rack-mount server. This type of performance was lacking in the current crop of two-socket blades, he said.

"This system is a true upgrade when you look at the benefits that a four-socket blade can offer compared to one with two sockets," McNerney said. "What we have done is double the memory and the I/O and created a blade that is equivalent of what a rack-mount server offers users today."

The Sun X8450 blades officially goes on sale in March, starting at $8,905, according to the company.

While Sun is updating one of its blade servers, Verari is offering a new enclosure that can support dozens of the company's Intel- and AMD-based blades, as well as the company's own storage servers. The BladeRack 2 XL also offers up to 672TB of data capacity, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports for each blade and the company's Vertical Cooling Technology.

Verari is gearing the BladeRack 2 XL platform toward it traditional base of users in the financial community as well as those business looking to deploy Web 2.0 applications. The enclosure is available now.